1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an improved method of assembling a thin film magnetic head to a suspension arm assembly. More particularly, this invention relates to a method of assembling a thin film magnetic head/slider to a suspension arm by contact soldering of said magnetic head/slider to said suspension arm for the purpose of simultaneously affixing the said head/slider to the said suspension arm while also establishing electrical contact to the head/slider.
2. Description of Related Art
The demand for increased data capacity coupled with market pressure for the reduction in the cost of said data storage capacity has created an ever increasing demand for more production efficient and less complex methods of assembling magnetic disk storage equipment.
One area of specific consideration has been, the speed with which a particular section of a magnetic disk can be accessed. In order to decrease this access time, the use of more than one read/write head on a single arm with multiple suspensions are being designed and used. However, while faster access times have been able to be achieved, current manufacturing techniques have not kept pace with these other developments. For instance, multi-head suspension arm assemblies are currently being assembled using single slider, single head assembly techniques. The expanded use of these single slider, single head assembly techniques has yielded a production system which is largely manual, requires excessive fixturing and furnaces, and uses tedious, partly manual wire bonding techniques.
For example, FIG. 1 shows a typical head/suspension arm assembly as known in the prior art. From the FIGURE it can be readily seen that the head assembly 9 is mechanically attached to a flexure support 7 of the suspension 5. Electrical connection 15 is made to the head assembly 9 by wire bonding of the twisted pair wiring 13. Mechanical and electrical connection are thus two separate assembly operations requiring separate, and numerous process steps.
A basic limiting factor of the presently known head/suspension assembly has been the skill in the art for manufacturing the thin film magnetic read/write head and slider assemblies. As has been known in the art for several years, thin film conductors are deposited as a spiral on the face of a ceramic substrate and have replaced the coil of wound wires as part of an inductive circuit for the magnetic read/write transducer. The spiral is arranged such that it is positioned in one of the rails of the slider with the electromagnetic head positioned on the trailing edge of the slider structure. While wire bonding has replaced soldering for connecting the electromagnetic head to the controller circuitry, the wires must still be assembled and laced across the suspension arm. The assembly operations are still time consuming and largely manual.
While there have been various modifications in the art for suspending the head from the suspension arm, these modifications have been concerned with flying height stability and flexure. Affixation of the head to the arm has primarily been achieved by epoxying the top of the slider to the bottom of the suspension. The epoxy is applied to the slide side facing the suspension so as to get a strong physical bond to the suspension. The side to which epoxy is applied is opposite to the side facing the disk (otherwise herein as slider top). Because of head and suspension arm joining techniques, peripheral support electronics, such as noise suppression hardware, and pre-amplifiers have always had to be located remotely from the magnetic transducer and the slider. Such methods of assembly are costly and do not maximize signal and minimize noise. It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel and automatable means of joining a thin film read/write magnetic head and head slider to the suspension to provide mechanical and electrical connection between slider top and suspension in one soldering operation.